How has Jeff Bezos built a company worth over $100 billion in one of the world's most competitive industries? While Amazon wins plaudits for its grasp of the user experience, on a strategic level the company keeps triumphing because it attacks competitors asmmetrically. The $199 Amazon Kindle Fire is a case in point. The formula underlying the Fire, as well as Amazon's other business model innovations, boils down to four components. Read about them in my post for Forbes.

R.E.M. pioneered a new market in music, establishing a unique sound that shepherded major change in listening tastes. Their story holds six lessons for how new markets form, and how early leaders should act as those markets mature. Read about them in my post at Forbes.

One of the surest routes to business success is to capture a new market, but this can be fiendishly difficult to accomplish. A big challenge is that the principles for success in these markets can be completely distinct from those that are taught in business schools, which tend to focus on markets that already exist. In a slide presentation for the website Change This (part of the leading online business bookseller 800 CEO READ), I've extracted ten principles from my book Capturing New Markets that describe many of the success factors needed. Download the presentation here.